TheSRO has announced the winners of the 2011 “What Path Are You Taking?” content contest. Read the winning entries below to see how these organizations are advancing the connection between quality and social responsibility.

First Place:

“A Team Approach to Social Responsibility”
Jon Morris,
JDQ Systems Inc.

Second Place:

“Getting a Boost from Quality Tools”
Tiffany Darabi,
Chemonics

Third Place:

“Getting a Boost from Quality Tools”
Nicholas Leifeld,
Serigraph Inc.

Congratulations to all of the participants!

Understanding emerging corporate sustainability practices through the lens of total quality management.

Key Takeaways

Ambiguity surrounds the term sustainability and consequently the scope of corporate sustainability initiatives; understanding the parallels between total quality management (TQM) and sustainability programs can help lessen that ambiguity

Companies poised to derive competitive advantages from sustainability treat their programs as an opportunity and not simply an added cost to absorb, another risk to manage or one more regulation with which to comply with.

Successful corporate sustainability programs to date share four important characteristics: a CEO champion, carefully chosen initiative leaders, multi-disciplinary teams and a dual focus on risk and opportunity. Successful corporate sustainability programs also produce multiple talent management benefits.

Read More

ASQ wants to know how you use quality tools and approaches to further your journey toward stronger social responsibility (SR). Tell us about your approach, and you could win…

1st place – iPad2

2nd place – Kindle reader

3rd place – One year’s subscription to ASQ’s Journal for Quality and Participation

The first-place entry will also receive recognition from a worldwide audience with publication in the Journal for Quality and Participation. All three winners will receive publication in the ASQ online Knowledge Center and theSRO*.

Submit entries by November 1, 2011. Click Here for more information and to submit your entry!

Quality tools have been used by industry for decades to create lean operations, reduce waste, and improve efficiency, but they have not been widely recognized in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) space. CSR grapples with energy efficiency, supply chain metrics, supplier engagement several tiers away, reduced waste, and keeping a strong focus on customer value, which in the quality world can be viewed as old challenges put in a new context and for a new era of increasingly networked and globalized operations.

This brief is a result of the ASQ and BSR strategic collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to frame how quality tools can be used by industry to create lean operations, reduce waste, and improve operating efficiencies

Some have described sustainability as the mother of invention but, says John Elkington, quality falls by the wayside when management focuses solely on cost

by John Elkington - executive chairman of Volans, co-founder of SustainAbility, a member of the IIRC, blogs, tweets and is a member of the Guardian’s sustainable business advisory panel. (published 6/22/11 in guardian.co.uk)

 As I pack my bags to fly back to London from San Francisco, they are significantly heavier. One reason is that they contain a huge piece of brass I just received from the American Society for Quality, the Spencer Hutchens Junior Medal. And because I had to kick off the society’s first pathways to social responsibility conference here, my brain is also a bit heavier – thanks to all the information I have had to absorb about the links between total quality management (TQM) and things I normally think about.

I started the quest with something of a prejudice. It had long seemed to me that the quality movement can at times aggravate the silo-ing that my concept of the triple bottom line has sometimes promoted, at least when poorly understood.

Consider the International Standards Organization. It launched its first quality standard, ISO 9000, in 1987, focusing on the management of quality in business. Later, in 1996, it came up with its family of environmental quality standards, starting with ISO 14001. And most recently we have ISO 26000, released in 2010 and designed to bring social responsibility into the fold. Continue reading blog